Altamont Free Festival
The Altamont Speedway Free Festival was a counterculture-era rock concert in 1969 in the United States, held at the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California on Saturday, December 6. The event is best known for considerable violence, including the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter and three accidental deaths: two caused by a hit-and-run car accident, and one by LSD-induced drowning in an irrigation canal. It was also reported that four babies were born. Scores were injured, numerous cars were stolen and then abandoned, and there was extensive property damage. The concert featured (in order of appearance): Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with the Rolling Stones taking the stage as the final act. The Grateful Dead were also scheduled to perform following CSNY, but declined to play shortly before their scheduled appearance due to the increasing violence at the venue. "That's the way things went at Altamont—so badly that the Grateful Dead, prime organizers and movers of the festival, didn't even get to play," staff at Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a detailed narrative on the event, terming it in an additional follow-up piece "rock and roll's all-time worst day, December 6th, a day when everything went perfectly wrong." Approximately 300,000 attended the concert, and some anticipated that it would be a "Woodstock West". Woodstock was held in Bethel, New York in mid-August, less than four months earlier. Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles shot footage of the event and incorporated it into the 1970 documentary film titled Gimme Shelter. Background The concert was originally going to be held at Golden Gate Park or San Jose State University's practice field, but plans fell through, due to a previously scheduled Chicago Bears–San Francisco 49ers football game at Kezar Stadium, located in Golden Gate Park, that made that venue impractical, and that San Jose wasn't in the mood for another big concert, as they previously held there a festival with 52 bands and 80,000 attendees. The venue was then changed to the Sears Point Raceway. However, a dispute with Sears Point's owner, Filmways, Inc., arose over a $300,000 up-front cash deposit from the Rolling Stones and film distribution rights, so the festival was moved once again. The Altamont Speedway was chosen at the suggestion of its then-owner, local businessman Dick Carter. The concert was to take place on Saturday, December 6; the location was switched on the night of Thursday, December 4. In making preparations, Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully and concert organizer Michael Lang helicoptered over the site before making the selection, much as Lang had done when the Woodstock Festival was moved at the last moment from Wallkill, New York, to Bethel, New York. The hasty move resulted in numerous logistical problems, including a lack of facilities such as portable toilets and medical tents. The move also created a problem for the stage design; instead of being on top of a rise, which characterized the geography at Sears Point, at Altamont the stage would now be at the bottom of a slope. The Rolling Stones' stage manager on the 1969 tour, Chip Monck, explained that "the stage was one metre high – 39 inches for us – and Sears Point it was on the top of a hill, so all the audience pressure was back upon them". Because of the short notice for the change of location, the stage couldn't be changed. "We weren’t working with scaffolding, we were working in an older fashion with parallels. You could probably have put another stage below it...but nobody had one," Monck said. Because the stage was so low, members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, led by Oakland chapter head Ralph "Sonny" Barger, were asked to surround the stage to provide security. Situation Deteriorates The first act on the stage, Santana, gave a performance that generally went smoothly; however, over the course of the day, the mood of both the crowd and the Angels became progressively agitated and violent. The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were very drunk. The crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers. A Mick Jagger biographer, Anthony Scaduto, in Mick Jagger: Everybody's Lucifer, wrote that the only time the crowd seemed to calm down to any degree was during a set by the country-rocking Flying Burrito Brothers. By the time the Rolling Stones took the stage in the early evening, the mood had taken a decidedly ugly turn as numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself. Denise Jewkes, lead singer of the local San Francisco rock band the Ace of Cups, six months pregnant, was hit in the head by an empty beer bottle thrown from the crowd and suffered a skull fracture. The Stones later paid all of Jewkes' ambulance and medical services. The Angels proceeded to arm themselves with sawed-off pool cues and motorcycle chains to drive the crowd further back from the stage. After the crowd (perhaps accidentally) toppled one of the Angels' motorcycles, the Angels became even more aggressive, including toward the performers. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane jumped off the stage to try and sort out the problem, only to be punched in the head and knocked unconscious by an Angel during the band's set, as seen in the documentary film Gimme Shelter. When Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner sarcastically thanked the Angels for knocking the singer out, Hells Angel Bill “Sweet William Tumbleweed” Fritsch took hold of a microphone and argued with him about it. The Grateful Dead had been scheduled to play between Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Rolling Stones, but after hearing about the Balin incident from Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, they refused to play and left the venue, citing the quickly degenerating security situation. The Rolling Stones waited until sundown to perform. Stanley Booth stated that part of the reason for the delay was that Bill Wyman had missed the helicopter ride to the venue. When the Stones began their set, a tightly-packed group of between 4,000 and 5,000 people were jammed to the very edge of the stage, and many attempted to climb onto it. Death of Meredith Hunter Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, who had already been punched in the head by a concertgoer within seconds of emerging from his helicopter, was visibly intimidated by the unruly situation and urged everyone to, "Just be cool down in the front there, don't push around." During the third song, "Sympathy for the Devil", a fight erupted in the front of the crowd at the foot of the stage, prompting the Stones to pause their set while the Angels restored order. After a lengthy pause and another appeal for calm, the band restarted the song and continued their set with less incident until the start of "Under My Thumb". Some of the Hells Angels got into a scuffle with Meredith Hunter, age 18, when he attempted to get onstage with other fans. One of the Hells Angels grabbed Hunter's head, punched him, and chased him back into the crowd. After a minute's pause, Hunter returned to the stage where, according to Gimme Shelter producer Porter Bibb, Hunter's girlfriend Patty Bredehoft found him and tearfully begged him to calm down and move further back in the crowd with her; but he was reportedly enraged, irrational and so high he could barely walk. Rock Scully, who could see the audience clearly from the top of a truck by the stage, said of Hunter, "I saw what he was looking at, that he was crazy, he was on drugs, and that he had murderous intent. There was no doubt in my mind that he intended to do terrible harm to Mick or somebody in the Rolling Stones, or somebody on that stage." Following his initial scuffle with the Angels as he tried to climb onstage, Hunter (as seen in concert footage wearing a bright lime-green suit) returned to the front of the crowd and drew a long-barreled .22 caliber revolver from inside his jacket. Hells Angel Alan Passaro, seeing Hunter drawing the revolver, drew a knife from his belt and charged Hunter from the side, parrying Hunter's pistol with his left hand and stabbing him twice with his right hand, killing him. The footage was shot by Eric Saarinen, who was on stage taking pictures of the crowd, and Baird Bryant, who climbed atop a bus. Saarinen was unaware of having caught the killing on film. This was discovered more than a week later when raw footage was screened in the New York offices of the Maysles Brothers. In the film sequence, lasting about two seconds, a two-meter (six foot) opening in the crowd appears, leaving Bredehoft in the center. Hunter enters the opening from the left. His hand rises toward the stage, and the silhouette of a revolver is clearly seen against Bredehoft's light-colored dress. Passaro is seen entering from the right and delivering two stabs with his knife as he parries Hunter's revolver and pushes him off-screen; the opening then closes around Bredehoft. Passaro was reported to have stabbed Hunter five times in the upper back, although only two stabs are visible in the footage. Witnesses also reported Hunter was stomped on by several Hells Angels while he was on the ground. The gun was recovered and turned over to police. Hunter's autopsy confirmed he was high on methamphetamine when he died. Passaro was arrested and tried for murder in the summer of 1971, but was acquitted after a jury viewed concert footage showing Hunter brandishing the revolver and concluded that Passaro had acted in self-defense. The Rolling Stones were aware of the skirmish, but not the stabbing ("You couldn't see anything, it was just another scuffle", Jagger tells David Maysles during film editing), and felt that had they abandoned the show, the crowd may have become even more unruly, leading to riots or other forms of violence. In 2003, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office initiated a two-year investigation into the possibility of a second Hells Angel having taken part in the stabbing. Finding insufficient support for this hypothesis, and reaffirming that Passaro acted alone, the office closed the case for good on May 25, 2005. Reactions The Altamont concert is often contrasted with the Woodstock festival that took place less than four months earlier. While Woodstock represented "peace and love", Altamont came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the de facto conclusion of late-1960s American youth culture: "Altamont became, whether fairly or not, a symbol for the death of the Woodstock Nation." Rock music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1972 that "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended." Writing for the New Yorker in 2015, Richard Brody said what Altamont ended was "the idea that, left to their own inclinations and stripped of the trappings of the wider social order, the young people of the new generation will somehow spontaneously create a higher, gentler, more loving grassroots order. What died at Altamont is the Rousseauian dream itself." The Grateful Dead wrote several songs about, or in response to, what lyricist Robert Hunter called "the Altamont affair", including "New Speedway Boogie" (featuring the line "One way or another, this darkness got to give") and "Mason's Children". Both songs were written and recorded during sessions for the early 1970 album Workingman's Dead, but "Mason's Children" was viewed as too "popular" stylistically and was consequently not included on the album. Altamont also inspired the Blue Öyster Cult song "Transmaniacon MC" ("MC" means "motorcycle club"), the opening track of their first album. The music magazine Rolling Stone stated, "Altamont was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity", in a 14-page 11-author article on the event entitled "The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed" published in their January 21, 1970 issue. The article covered the many issues with the event's organization and was very critical of the organizers and the Rolling Stones; one writer stated: "what an enormous thrill it would have been for an Angel to kick Mick Jagger's teeth down his throat." Another follow-up piece in Rolling Stone called the Altamont event "rock and roll's all-time worst day". In Esquire magazine, Ralph J. Gleasonobserved, "The day The Rolling Stones played there, the name Altamont became etched in the minds of millions of people who love pop music and who hate it as well. If the name 'Woodstock' has come to denote the flowering of one phase of the youth culture, 'Altamont' has come to mean the end of it." The film Gimme Shelter was criticized by Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and other reviewers for portraying the Stones too sympathetically and exploiting the events. Salon's Michael Sragow, writing in 2000, said many of the critics took their cues from the Rolling Stone review, which heavily blamed the filmmakers for the disastrous events at the concert. Sragow pointed out numerous errors in the Rolling Stone coverage and added that the Maysles did not make "major motion pictures" in the traditional way; instead, a variety of factors contributed to the tragedy. The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards was relatively sanguine about the show, calling it "basically well-handled, but lots of people were tired and a few tempers got frayed" and "on the whole, a good concert." In 2008, a former FBI agent asserted that some members of the Hells Angels had conspired to murder Mick Jagger in retribution for the Rolling Stones' lack of support following the concert, and for the negative portrayal of the Angels in the Gimme Shelter film. The conspirators reportedly used a boat to approach a residence where Jagger was staying on Long Island, New York; the plot failing when the boat was nearly sunk by a storm. Jagger's spokesperson has refused to comment on the matter. The Altamont Speedway, where the concert was held, continued to operate up until October 2008, when it was permanently closed. The speedway now sits abandoned, filled with graffiti. Gallery A1.jpg|The crowd of the festival. A2.jpg|Mike Carabello, Gregg Rolie and Carlos Santana performing with Santana at the festival. A3.jpg|Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman performing with the Flying Buritto Brothers at the festival. A4.jpg|Jack Casady, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick and Jorma Kaukonen performing with Jefferson Airplane at the festival. A5.jpg|Rolling Stones Mick Tucker, Mick Jaggar, Bill Wyman and Keith Richards performing at the festival. A6.jpg|The abandoned stage of the festival after it ended. Category:Awful Moments in Music History Category:Events